The Last Englishman

Philip Womack marvels at the secret life of Arthur Ransome

By Philip Womack

3:25PM BST 20 Aug 2009

The name of Arthur Ransome conjures up a particularly English idyll: a place where children can roam free from parental interference, a “pastoral, old-fashioned utopia set in the Lake District sometime between the wars, with its roots in the Edwardian heyday of the British Empire”.

The adventures of the Walker children are as innocent as ice cream, where the only crime is being a “duffer” – so it comes as a surprise to discover that Ransome was not only a foreign correspondent who was an eyewitness to the Soviet revolution, but that also, while married to an Englishwoman, he had an affair with Trotsky’s secretary. If that wasn’t enough to shatter your image of the avuncular, pipe-smoking fisherman, it is entirely possible that he was a double agent, working for both MI6 and the Bolsheviks.

You may snort in surprise over your beloved copy of Swallows and Amazons: so did most people when Roland Chambers explained his book during the course of his research. How could a middle-class boy from Leeds become so sympathetic to a cause that threatened to destroy the class he hailed from? The answer, it seems, is that the things that drew him to the bourgeoisie were also the things that repelled him.

Ransome’s early life was just like any other boy’s – a series of obsessions, collecting and model building – except that he had the fortune to meet the anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin, who taught him how to skate at the bottom of his garden on a frozen pond. Such figures were common, friends of the intellectual milieu in which his father moved. Ransome’s father (who was never very nice to him) died during his first term at Rugby, causing him to develop a close relationship with his mother. Showing absolutely no aptitude at school, he took a job as an errand boy at Grant Richards, a small but successful publisher.

He dreamed of being a writer. A gawky, bespectacled boy with a grin who threw himself into bohemian London, he made friends easily, declared love to almost every woman he met, and wrote many books. None of them sold.

He married a woman (Ivy Walker) whose mother was a lunatic who believed the Sun God was in love with her; Ivy herself had a tenuous grasp of reality, once summoning Ransome to her bedroom so that she could pour a plateful of poached eggs over her head. Ivy constantly demanded fine clothes, pets, attention, none of which Ransome could supply. They had a child, Tabitha. These early years as a Grub Street inkslinger were hard, and Ransome does not come out of them very well. Typical diary entries read: “Piles terrible”; “Paid sixpence for the ginger kitten – piles bad”; “Nanny gave notice, paid sixpence to have the kitten taken away again.”

Ransome did have the odd triumph: a critical biography of Oscar Wilde caused a libel action from Lord Alfred Douglas, which Ransome won dramatically when De Profundis was read out in full in court. But his marriage was collapsing, his books (between 1904 and 1915, 14 of them) not shifting; his instinct was to flee to Russia as a correspondent for the Daily News.

Dogged by failure and tortured by haemorrhoids, he got a nosebleed every time he wrote an article. In Russia he moved, gradually, to the Left. He witnessed the March 1917 revolution first hand but, somewhat characteristically, missed the November revolution: he was in England, fishing for perch. After meeting Trotsky, he fell in love with Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky’s personal secretary, and embarked on a passionate affair with this “tall, jolly girl”. This gave him unparalleled access to news and he reaped the benefits. (Evgenia’s nickname for him was Charlie Chaplin, because he walked like the little tramp when suffering from piles.)

Ransome was an opportunist who could never stand up to anything. He even used his daughter, at the age of eight, as a vehicle to tell Ivy of his affair with Evgenia, casually letting it slip in a letter. He was an unsavoury character who thought the Bolsheviks were on a par with pirates from Treasure Island or knights of the Round Table, a man who only looked out for himself. Perhaps the most apt description of him comes from Sir Cavendish Bentinck of the Foreign Office: he was “trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds”. His sympathy for the Bolshevik cause was not born out of any political empathy; it was just the easiest thing for him to do at the time.

This is a fascinating study of a strange man. My only disappointment is that Ransome turned out to be that thing the children of his tales so fear and detest: an absolute duffer.

The Last Englishman: the Double Life of Arthur Ransome by Roland Chambers